Tuesday, September 29, 2009

David Martin’s 13-minute “60 Minutes” interview with General StanleyMcChrystal (September 27), the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, may haveseemed like one more of those insufferable Sunday evening puff pieces, likeSteve Kroft’s strokejob with Clarence Thomas in September 2007 and MorleySafer’s with Bobby Jindahl in March 2009. As in the Kroft and Safer interviews,Martin never asked a question that went faster than slowball and he spent thewhole time playing hagiographer and straight-man. He never asked one significantfollow-up question. If he’d been a flack for DoD editing this piece in thePentagon studio he couldn’t have done a better job.

But the interview was more than just another “60 Minutes” puff piece.Four-star battlefront generals don’t put on dog-and-pony shows for reporterswithout a very good reason for doing so, and he put on a very fancy show forMartin, with stops at his room, his office, his briefing room, trips in hishelicopter and SUV, and much more. It’s difficult to imagine that McChrystal’sreason was anything other than putting pressure on the Obama administration togive him the series of very large troop increases he thinks he needs to win hiswar.

David Brooks sounds like a preacher (in fact, he sounds like me in Sunday's sermon) in his NYT column:

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have tocut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again aproducer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financialself-restraint, large and small.

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — therighteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses thattheir groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of thelarger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demandfor low taxes and high spending.

A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange thecurrent alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts thatare now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is whatthe country actually needs.

In fact, if you were to look back in this blog at many of my posts on the economy, you would find me complaining about all the debt and fiscal irresponsibility that brought on the current crisis.

However....

It seems to me that Brooks' analysis is very shallow and incomplete. He cites four symptoms of 'erosion' in our financial values: state lotteries, large executive pay packages, large restaurant servings, and high debt to GDP ratio. Give me a break.

Of these, two are relevant (not lotteries and McDonald's french fries!). Large executive pay is one part of a much larger problem: the increasingly maldistribution of wealth and growing income and wealth inequality. My take on this is that it had many causes: the decline of manufacturing and increase in outsourcing, the rise of the financial sector, the decline and fall of labor unions, the hidden inflation which ate away at our standard of living, tax law changes favoring the wealthy, the pushing of credit/debt onto the public via the financial sector, and so on. All of this has been the result of conservative ideology being put into policy via the Reagan revolution, as well as the rise of neo-liberalism and globalization in the Democratic Party. The Republican Party has moved to the far right, while the Democratic Party left behind its New Deal/Great Society roots and also moved to the right. And all of this moved us away from the egalitarian ethos of the New Deal toward the inequalities of the Gilded Age.

Another part of this big puzzle is that we were the only major industrial country that didn't suffer from severe damage and disruption during World War II. In terms of industrial and economic party, we had the whole party to ourselves for a couple of decades after the war. Then as the countries of Europe and Asia recovered, and then India and China began to modernize, our portion of the pie began to shrink. This is not often recognized by the major parties to the debate on this issue, that it would be hard for us to stay ahead of the rest of the world under any circumstances.

A third major factor is our continuing reliance on expensive foreign oil, which has driven up our trade deficit to simply astronomical levels, weakening our economy and the dollar.

Now, as far as I can tell, almost none of these things will really be resolved by a 'revival of economic morality', at least as Brooks describes it (lotteries, supersizing it, etc.). It will take a turning away from the economic ideology and policies of the last 30 years. Which might (or might not) be happening right now, depending on how you perceive the changes Obama is making.

In any case, it is not a new Puritan ethics that will solve this problem, not that I'm against Puritan ethics. Actually, the Methodist John Wesley, decidedly not Calvinist, put it just as well: make all you can, save all you can, give all you can. Now, that will preach!

Richard Cohen's column in the Washington Post today is the single most sarcastic and negative thing I have yet read about Obama. There is a personal harshness to this critique that is breathtaking.

Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is thepresident of the United States. As of yet, though, he does not act that way,appearing promiscuously on television and granting interviews like thepresidential candidate he no longer is. The election has been held, but thecampaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Garry Wills is one of most insightful intellectuals and historians. Anything he writes should be paid attention to. In the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Wills writes about how quickly Obama has begun acting like Bush. He attributes this behavior to our great national security empire that has been built up over the last 60 years. An extended excerpt:

Some were dismayed to see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at thepowers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into suchopprobrium. Leon Panetta at the CIA especially puzzled those who had known himduring the Clinton years. A former CIA official told The Washington Post, "LeonPanetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for theinterrogation program in the first place." A White House official told JaneMayer of The New Yorker, "It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that turning around the hugesecret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhapsimpossible, task. After most of the wars in US history there was a return to theconstitutional condition of the pre-war world. But after those wars there was nolasting institutional security apparatus of the sort that was laboriouslyassembled in the 1940s and 1950s. After World War I, for instance, there was noCIA, no NSA, no mountain of secret documents to be guarded from unauthorizedreaders, no atomic bomb to guard, develop, deploy, and maintain in readiness onland, in the air, and on (or in) the sea.

Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that islargely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated onethousand military bases in other countries. I say "estimated" because the exactnumber, location, and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked insecrecy, among other things to protect nuclear installations.The secrecyinvolved is such that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did noteven know, at first, that we had nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey.

A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire's secrets. He feelshe must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, anddiplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in thisvast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner ofcommitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman couldnot not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at hisdisposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing thatmakes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is aself-entangling giant.

Yes, China’s leaders have decided to go green — out of necessity becausetoo many of their people can’t breathe, can’t swim, can’t fish, can’t farm andcan’t drink thanks to pollution from its coal- and oil-based manufacturinggrowth engine. And, therefore, unless China powers its development with cleanerenergy systems, and more knowledge-intensive businesses without smokestacks,China will die of its own development.

What do we know about necessity? It is the mother of invention. Andwhen China decides it has to go green out of necessity, watch out. You will notjust be buying your toys from China. You will buy your next electric car, solarpanels, batteries and energy-efficiency software from China.

One more quote from Krugman on climate change, on why it's on the backburner:

But the larger reason we’re ignoring climate change is that Al Gore wasright: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change withthe vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastatingfor the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting somepowerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And theindustries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; theindustries of the future don’t.

Nor is it just a matter of vested interests. It’s also a matter ofvested ideas. For three decades the dominant political ideology in America hasextolled private enterprise and denigrated government, but climate change is aproblem that can only be addressed through government action. And rather thanconcede the limits of their philosophy, many on the right have chosen to denythat the problem exists.

So here we are, with the greatest challenge facing mankind on the backburner, at best, as a policy issue. I’m not, by the way, saying that the Obamaadministration was wrong to push health care first. It was necessary to showvoters a tangible achievement before next November. But climate changelegislation had better be next.

I find myself trying to stay away from columns on climate change, because of the way they make me feel (depressed). Today's Krugman column is no different, but it's interesting the way he starts:

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’vebeen following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’rehurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything toavert it.

And here’s the thing: I’m not engaging in hyperbole. These days, direwarnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of themost widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers. Theprognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last fewyears.

This is exactly what I've concluded over the last few years, as I read and observed with growing alarm. It is without a doubt the most important issue we face, yet it is currently being neglected in Washington, pushed aside by other concerns such as health care and Afghanistan.

In my heart of hearts, I believe Obama feels and knows it to be the most important issue we face, but I think the Washington bubble may have led him to focus on the more near-term things. Understandable, but still a big mistake perhaps. And actually, 'near-term' increasingly describes the effects of climate change.

And we’re not just talking about disasters in the distant future, either.The really big rise in global temperature probably won’t take place until thesecond half of this century, but there will be plenty of damage long beforethen.

For example, one 2007 paper in the journal Science is titled“Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate inSouthwestern North America” — yes, “imminent” — and reports “a broad consensusamong climate models” that a permanent drought, bringing Dust Bowl-typeconditions, “will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within atime frame of years to decades.”

So if you live in, say, Los Angeles, and liked those pictures of redskies and choking dust in Sydney, Australia, last week, no need to travel.They’ll be coming your way in the not-too-distant future.

Ross Douthat unfortunately makes a very good point about Obama having boxed himself in on Afghanistan (see excerpt below). Yet he also acknowledges that the options are horrible and that Obama risks failure unless he becomes a completely convinced that he has to fight this war all-out and brings as much of the country with him as possible. Douthat thinks this is unlikely. No wonder this decision is being seen as pivotal to Obama's presidency.

I heard a similar theme, in public and private, from many counterinsurgencyadvocates last week. Having recently described Afghanistan as a “war ofnecessity,” they asked, can the president really turn down a request for moretroops from a general he himself appointed to support a campaign that hepersonally endorsed?

The answer is very likely no. However serious his doubts aboutescalation, Obama seems boxed in — by the thoroughness of McChrystal’sassessment and the military’s united front, by his own arguments across the lasttwo years and by his party’s long-running insistence on painting Afghanistan asthe neglected “good war.”

Last night's segment on 60 Minutes about General Stanley McChrystal (that last name is hard to spell) was very interesting. It could reasonably be thought of as a 'puff piece', encouraging Americans to think of this man in the best possible light. That always makes me suspicious. The average person shouldn't be seeing this much about the commanders in the field, except that there is a political donnybrook going on in the Adminstration.

Here is an article about him I found in the Guardian newspaper, with an excerpt from the last few paragraphs. This General could be trouble for Obama.

Born 14 August 1954 to Major General Herbert McChrystal. He was the fourthchild in a family of five boys and a girl, all of whom would serve or marry intothe military. McChrystal has a wife and adult son. Currently commander ISAFinternational forces in Afghanistan.

Best of times Credited with masterminding the killing of Abu Musabal-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida leader in Iraq. Zarqawi claimed responsibility fornumerous bombings and executions.Worst of times A Pentagon investigationruled that McChrystal was "accountable for the inaccurate and misleadingassertions" in the scandal surrounding the death of former football star PatTillman in Afghanistan in 2004. McChrystal approved his posthumous citation fora Silver Star, claiming he died in "the line of devastating enemy fire". Itemerged that McChrystal wrote a memo to senior military officials that Tillmanmight actually have been killed by friendly fire.

There is a serious case to be made that it's not worth taking the UnitedNations seriously, that it's an anachronistic institution based on 60-year-oldgeopolitics and a platform for tyrants and weirdos. But while much of that istrue, the United Nations is the only organization in the world to which allcountries belong. As such it does have considerable legitimacy. And that meanspower. As David Bosco points out in Foreign Policy magazine, over the past twodecades the Security Council has authorized "more than a dozen peacekeepingmissions, imposed sanctions or arms embargoes on 10 states, and created severalwar crimes tribunals to prosecute those responsible for genocide and crimesagainst humanity, including sitting heads of state." It's worth putting in theeffort to shape its decisions.

Obama's speech was part of a calculated strategy. In sentiment itrecalls Richard Nixon's line after losing the California governor's race in1962: "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." Obama was telling theworld: The United States is willing to be cooperative, to rejoin internationalinstitutions, to adhere to treaties. But in return, other countries will have tohelp solve some of the world's common problems. You can't just kick us aroundanymore.

Let's go back one year. Many countries had come to believe that Americashowed little interest in the world. This hostility had become an easy excuse toreject even modest concessions to U.S. requests. If this sounds partisan, recallthat after he was elected president of France in 2007, the pro-Americanconservative Nicolas Sarkozy was asked by Condoleezza Rice what she could do tohelp him. "Improve your image in the world," he said.

Obama's outreach to the world is an experiment, and not merely to see ifthe world will respond. He wants to demonstrate at home that engagement does notmake America weak. For decades, it's been thought deadly for an Americanpolitician to be seen as seeking international cooperation. Denouncing,demeaning and insulting other countries was a cheap and easy way to seem strong.In the battle of images, tough and stupid always seemed to win.

Obama is gambling that America is mature enough to understandthat machismo is not foreign policy and that grandstanding on the global stagewon't succeed.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

A review of a new book by Peter Maass, "Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil":

Oil is the curse of the modern world; it is “the devil’s excrement,” in thewords of the former Venezuelan oil minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, who isconsidered to be the father of OPECand should know. Our insatiable need for oil has brought us global warming,Islamic fundamentalism and environmental depredation. It has turned the UnitedStates and China, the world’s biggest consumers of petroleum, into greedy,irresponsible addicts that can’t see beyond their next fix. With a fewexceptions, like Norway and the United Arab Emirates, oil doesn’t even benefitthe nations from which it is extracted. On the contrary: Most oil-rich stateshave been doomed to a seemingly permanent condition of kleptocracy by a few,poverty for the rest, chronic backwardness and, worst of all, the loss of anational soul.

We can’t be rid of the stuff soon enough.

Such is the message of Peter Maass’s slender but powerfully written newbook, “Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.” Unquestionably, by fuelingbetter and faster transportation and powering cities and factories, oil has beencritical to modern economies. But oil has also made possible the mostdestructive wars in history, and it has left human society in a historicalcul-de-sac. Despite much hue and cry today, Maass argues, we seem unable to movebeyond an oil-based global economy, and we are going to hit a wall soon.

This is basically what James Howard Kunstler has been saying for years now.

Frank Rich writes today in the NYT that Obama has a Kennedyesque decision to make about Afghanistan. He likens it to JFK's decision about Vietnam early in his presidency. The following quote picks up with a possible decision to wind it down:

If Obama instead decides to embrace some variation on the Biden option,he’ll have a different challenge. He’ll face even more violent attacks than hedid this summer. When George Will wrote a recent column titled “Time to Get Outof Afghanistan,” he was accused of “urging retreat and accepting defeat” (byWilliam Kristol) and of “waving the bloody shirt” (by Fred Kagan, an officialadviser to McChrystal who, incredibly enough, freelances as a blogger atNational Review). The editorial page at Will’s home paper, The Washington Post,declared that deviating from McChrystal’s demand for more troops “would bothdishonor and endanger this country.” If a conservative columnist can provokeneocon invective this hysterical, just imagine what will be hurled atObama.

But the author of “Lessons in Disaster” does not believe that a changein course in Afghanistan would be a disaster for Obama’s young presidency. “Hisgreatest qualities as president,” Goldstein says, “are his quality of mind andhis quality of judgment — his dispassionate ability to analyze a situation. Ifhe was able to do that here, he might more than survive a short-term hit fromthe military and right-wing pundits. He would establish his credibility as apresident who will override his advisers when a strategy doesn’t makesense.”

Either way, it’s up to the president to decide what he thinks is rightfor the country’s security, the politics be damned. That he has temporarilypressed the pause button to think it through while others, including some of hisown generals, try to lock him in is not a sign of indecisiveness but ofconfidence and strength. It is, perhaps, Obama’s most significant down paymentyet on being, in the most patriotic sense, Kennedyesque.

In trying to get ahold of the faulty regulatory structure in our government, one big question is what should be the Federal Reserve's role in all this. This from the Washington Post today:

The Federal Reserve is best known as an economic shepherd, responsible foradjusting interest rates to keep prices steady and unemployment low. But sinceits creation, the Fed has held a second job as a banking regulator, one of fourfederal agencies responsible for keeping banks healthy and protecting theircustomers. Congress also authorized the Fed to write consumer protection rulesenforced by all the agencies.

During the boom, however, the Fed left those powers largely unused. Itimposed few new constraints on mortgage lending and pulled back from enforcingrules that did exist.

The Fed's performance was undercut by several factors, according todocuments and more than two dozen interviews with current and former Fedgovernors and employees, government officials, industry executives and consumeradvocates. It was crippled by the doubts of senior officials about the value ofregulation, by a tendency to discount anecdotal evidence of problems and by itsaffinity for the financial industry.

Official Washington is starting to realize that in addition to his personalskills, Obama has assembled a highly professional and effective nationalsecurity team that serves him and the nation very well.

His first -- and in some ways most important -- decision was to ask RobertGates, George W. Bush's defense secretary, to remain in charge of the Pentagon.Gates was anything but an obvious choice. Obama had campaigned as a sharp criticof Bush policy in Iraq and had clearly signaled that he would insist on a newapproach to Afghanistan. Keeping the boss of the old policies wascounterintuitive -- and offensive to some of Obama's Democratic allies.

But Obama recognized Gates's strengths. And he bolstered the team when hepicked as his national security adviser retired Marine general Jim Jones,another widely respected veteran of past administrations and a man of greatself-discipline and few ego needs.

The choice of Hillary Clinton was the most dramatic given their history asrivals in a protracted battle for the nomination. The full story has not beentold of why he wanted her and why she wanted to be secretary of state. But sofar, it is working better than almost anyone could have imagined.

I agree with this, except that I wish he had someone in this mix who represented a little less 'hawkish' position, if only to make sure the position is represented.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

As PresidentObama weighs sending more troops to Afghanistan, one of the mostconsequential decisions of his presidency, he has discovered that the militaryis not monolithic in support of the plan and that some of the civilian advisershe respects most have deep reservations.

While Mr. Obama is hearing from more hawkish voices, including those ofSecretary of State HillaryRodham Clinton and RichardC. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, someoutside advisers relied on by Mr. Obama have voiced doubts.

Former Secretary of State ColinL. Powell, a retired four-star Army general, visited Mr. Obama in the OvalOffice this month and expressed skepticism that more troops would guaranteesuccess, according to people briefed on the discussion. Mr. Powell reminded thepresident of his longstanding view that military missions should be clearlydefined.

Mr. Powell is one of the three people, with Senator JohnF. Kerry and Senator JackReed, considered by White House aides to be most influential in this currentdebate. All have expressed varying degrees of doubt about the prospect ofsending more forces to Afghanistan.

Mr. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Foreign RelationsCommittee, has warned of repeating the mistakes of Vietnam, where he served, andhas floated the idea of a more limited counterterrorist mission. Mr. Reed,Democrat of Rhode Island and an Army veteran, has not ruled out supporting moretroops but said “the burden of proof” was on commanders to justify it.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Many leaders and supporters are beginning to wonder, what is causing thisgrowing gap between the Barack Obama that many people saw on the campaign trail,and the Obama they see in the White House? Beyond Obama's oratorical skills,which excited not only American voters but people all over the world, he ismostly untested as a politician. His previous experience was only a few years inthe US Senate and a few years more as a state senator. A sinking feeling isarising among many that President Obama may not be up to the task, that he maynot possess the artful skills needed to accomplish even his own goals.

But it must be recognized that it's not just Obama's shortcomings thatare causing the problem. The very structure of the American political system isat the heart of these failures. For example, thwarting Obama on a regular basisis an unrepresentative Senate where "minority rule" prevails and undermines whata majority of the country may want. With two senators elected per state,regardless of population, California with more than 35 million people has thesame number of senators as Wyoming with just half a million residents. Thisconstitutional arrangement greatly favors low population states, many of whichtend to be conservative, producing what one political analyst has called "aweighted vote for small-town whites in pickup trucks with gun racks."

In addition, the Senate's use of that arcane rule known as the"filibuster" means you need 60 out of 100 votes to stop unlimited debate on abill and move to a vote. A mere 41 senators, representing as little as 20% ofthe nation's population, can stymie what the other 80% wants. Given a vastlyunrepresentative senate wielding its anti-majoritarian filibuster, it is hardlysurprising that minority rule in the senate consistently undermines majorityrule, whether on health care, financial industry reform, environmentallegislation and many other policies.

Pile on to that an uncompetitive, winner-take-all electoral system, marinated in money and special interest influence, and the sclerotic US political scene is deeply troubling. None of these anti-democratic structural features are going away any time soon. Unless Barack Obama is able to demonstrate a better level of political skill than he has shown so far, everyone needs to fasten their seat belts. The world is about to enter a challenging phase where the US - the undisputed leader of the free world for the past 60 years - is going to rapidly cede its place at the head of the line.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

A new book on 9/11 has been published by the former Senior Counsel to the official 9/11 Commission, John Farmer (also former Attorney General for New Jersey and currently Dean of the Rutgers-Newark School of Law).

In The Ground Truth (which I have not had a chance to read) Mr. Farmer actually shows that the official version of what happened on 9/11, as given in the Commission's final report, is almost entirely untrue. And if you can believe this, he actually wrote the official report of the 9/11 Commission. And now he is saying that it is based on lies told to the Commission.

...“at some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened... I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The [Norad air defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. This is not spin.”

Governor Thomas Kean, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, has said, “We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us, it was just so far from the truth. . . "

In 2006, The Washington Post reported..."Suspicion of wrongdoing ran sodeep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenurein summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department forcriminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff membersand some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enoughprobable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the lawby making false statements to Congress and to the commission..."

What does Farmer's book tell us? Farmer offers no solutions, only atotal and full rejection of what was told and his own ideas concerning the totalfailure of honesty on the part of the government, a government with something tohide.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

I am writing this final post on my blog, as a free and open-to-the-public blog. In 24 hours, I will be restricting it to those of my friends who are interested in reading it because they're interested in what I'm thinking and who I'm quoting. For most of us (except those few people earning a living doing it), that's what internet blogs are for.

I have been writing this blog for the last 12 months and 8 days. It has become for me several things: a personal journal of reflection and inquiry on the political and social issues of our day; a way of sharing with my friends some of my thoughts and opinions on politics and current affairs; and finally a hobby, a form of play, the equivalent of going fishing or golfing.

I never intended it to become something controversial in my church, something that detracted from my pastoral role there. That is why I never told anyone in my church about it who I thought would have a problem with it.

In restricting access to it, I am not saying that I am ashamed of this blog. In fact, I am proud of it as a record of the ongoing debate in our country about international, economic, and political affairs over the last crucial year in our country. I am proud of it as a record of some of my thoughts and reflections on that year. I value it for that reason.

But I can understand how some people might be upset by it, people to whom I have to minister and preach, people who have difficulty with their pastor having political views with which they might disagree.

Quite clearly, I do have some strong and occasionally provocative political views. As many of you do. It's simply a part of who we are. But please believe me when I say that I don't judge anyone as a parishioner based on their political views, and I would hope that people would not judge me as a pastor based on mine. In Methodist churches, we basically agree to disagree on politics, unlike some churches, where everyone agrees to agree on everything. That's why we don't talk about it in church. We're liberals, conservatives, radicals, libertarians, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and everything inbetween.

Frankly, I don't expect, nor want, my parishioners to be reading this blog. Believe me, it's hard to find on the internet unless you know where to look. It's just my little personal hobby that has nothing to do with my role as a pastor. And I do have a life outside the church.

In the meantime, I will continue to write it, for all the reasons I gave above. But clearly, to avoid problems, I need to restrict it to those who will find it a valuable and pleasing experience, and not disturbing. So let me know if you fall into the former category. I'm at clindquist@lexcominc.net.

But in its origins neoconservatism was a movement of the center-left, notof the right. Here is Nathan Glazer, co-editor with Irving Kristol of the PublicInterest, in that magazine's final issue in spring 2005, recalling the originsof the journal in the 1960s: "All of us had voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964,for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and I would wager (?) that most of the originalstalwarts of The Public Interest, editors and regular contributors, continued tovote for Democratic presidential candidates all the way to the present. Recallthat the original definition of the neoconservatives was that they fullyembraced the reforms of the New Deal and indeed the major programs of Johnson'sGreat Society ... Had we not defended the major social programs, from SocialSecurity to Medicare, there would have been no need for the 'neo' before'conservative.'"

The "neoconservatism" of the 1990s, defined by support for the invasionof Iraq and centered on Rupert Murdoch's magazine the Weekly Standard, edited byIrving's son William Kristol, had little to do with the original impulse, asGlazer points out: "There is very little overlap between those who promoted theneoconservatism of the 1970s and those committed to its latter daymanifestation." While Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz set aside anydifferences with the Republican right by the 1990s, other first-generationneocons like Glazer and the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan remained true to theirNew Deal/Great Society principles. Several of them told me over the years thatthey thought of themselves as "paleoliberals," not "neoconservatives," a termthat was coined as an insult by the socialist Michael Harrington and embraced asa badge of honor by Irving Kristol.

In its origins, neoconservatism was a defense of New Deal/Great Societyliberalism at home and abroad, both from the radical, countercultural left ofthe era and from its own design defects. The early neocons were Kennedy-Johnsonliberals who believed that liberal reform should avoid naive utopianism andshould be guided by pragmatism and empirical social science. The '70sneoconservatives were so focused on the utopianism of the '60s campus left,however, that most paid too little attention to a far greater threat to theirbeloved New Deal tradition, the utopianism of the libertarian right. UltimatelyMilton Friedman and other free-market ideologues did far more damage to Americathan the carnival freaks of the counterculture.

The sins of the sons should not be visited upon the fathers. I hope that, in the judgment of history, the "paleoliberal" neoconservatism of the 1970s will overshadow the crude, militaristic neoconservatism of the 1990s and 2000s. For two decades, between the Johnson years and the Reagan years, neoconservatism really was the vital center that Arthur Schlesinger had called for in the late 1940s. A robust new liberalism, if there is to be one in the aftermath of the opportunistic triangulations of Clinton and Obama, cannot leapfrog back to the Progressives or New Dealers, but must begin closer to home, with the early neoconservatives, who had learned from the failures and mistakes as well as the successes of the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society.

I agree with Andrew Sullivan's take on the evolution of neo-conservatism under the Kristols (father Irving and son William) and their comrades:

And this is why David Brooks' encomium to Irving Kristol today does notconvince me. If Irving Kristol had remained a real empirical skeptic, as Brooksclaims Kristol was throughout, he would have resisted the transformation ofconservatism into a religious cult and a neo-imperial movement. But he didneither.

He actually celebrated the cooptation of conservatism by religiousfanaticism, refusing to make any enemies on his right, as his empirical critiqueof the welfare state morphed into the idolatry of Reagan, the collapse of anyserious interest in actually governing, the enabling of massive, destabilizingdebt, and unwavering support for Israel's long assisted suicide.

Yes, there was an affect of laconic disinterestedness. But it was anaffect, like his even more radical son's urbane gussying up of know-nothingviolence and fiscal recklessness. The gimmick of the Kristols was to wrap aTrotskyite mentality in a world-weary, bourgeois gauze. It enabled them to evadeany responsibility for their grotesque errors, errors which led to the deathsand torture of countless people, and the bankrupting of America, whilepretending to be reasonable and empirical intellectuals.

*beck v. trans. beck-ing, beck-ed, to be baselessly attacked by an idiot with a megaphone, then have those accusations alter your life for the worse because it’s politically expedient for your spineless superiors to demote or fire you

The Washington Post in an editorial this morning offers a full-throated defense of General McChrystal's costly counter-insurgency strategy, which Obama seems to be backing away from even though he had given such a strategy his full support last March:

What has changed since March? As Mr. Obama noted, Afghanistan'spresidential election has been plagued by allegations of fraud, sharpeningquestions about whether the government can be a reliable partner. Talibanattacks are spreading despite the deployment of 21,000 additional troopsapproved by the president earlier this year. Some in and outside theadministration have argued for a more limited strategy centered on strikingal-Qaeda's leaders, giving up the more ambitious political and economic tasksbuilt into the counterinsurgency doctrine.

It's hard to see, however, how Mr. Obama can refute the analysis heoffered last March. "If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban or allowsal-Qaeda to go unchallenged," he said then, "that country will again be a basefor terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can."Afghanistan, he continued, "is inextricably linked to the future of itsneighbor, Pakistan," where al-Qaeda and the Taliban now aim at seizing controlof a state that possesses nuclear weapons. Moreover, Mr. Obama said, "a returnto Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance . . . and thedenial of basic human rights to the Afghan people -- especially women andgirls."

"To succeed, we and our friends and allies must reverse the Taliban'sgains, and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government," Mr. Obama concluded. As Gen. McChrystal's report makes very clear, keeping faith with that goal will require more troops, more resources and years of patience. Yet tobreak with it would both dishonor and endanger this country. As the presidentput it, "the world cannot afford the price that will come due if Afghanistanslides back into chaos."

This demonstrates quite nicely the Washington Post's editorial page slant these days: hawkish, even neo-conservative, advocacy of full-bodied military intervention in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. It's pretty amazing, really. And disastrous, in my opinion.

Monday, September 21, 2009

In the grim period that followed Lehman’s failure, it seemed inconceivablethat bankers would, just a few months later, be going right back to thepractices that brought the world’s financial system to the edge of collapse. Atthe very least, one might have thought, they would show some restraint for fearof creating a public backlash.

But now that we’ve stepped back a few paces from the brink — thanks, let’snot forget, to immense, taxpayer-financed rescue packages — the financial sectoris rapidly returning to business as usual. Even as the rest of the nationcontinues to suffer from rising unemployment and severe hardship, Wall Streetpaychecks are heading back to pre-crisis levels. And the industry is deployingits political clout to block even the most minimal reforms.

The good news is that senior officials in the Obama administration andat the Federal Reserve seem to be losing patience with the industry’sselfishness. The bad news is that it’s not clear whether President Obama himselfis ready, even now, to take on the bankers.

Okay, then what are some solutions, Dr. Krugman?

If we really want to stop Wall Street from creating another bubble,followed by another bust, we need to change the industry’s incentives — whichmeans, in particular, changing the way bankers are paid.

What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bankexecutives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — butaren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. Thisencourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for thecurrent crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in thegood years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuseseventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financialsystem in the process.

Got it. So what's holding us progress in this reform?

I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with BloombergNews, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” heasked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankersbut not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”

That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the NationalFootball League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the wholeworld’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too manyrisky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts.Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to knowthat.

All I can think is that this was another example of something we’ve seenbefore: Mr. Obama’s visceral reluctance to engage in anything that resemblespopulist rhetoric. And that’s something he needs to get over.

Ross Douthat, new conservative columnist, writes in the NYT about how George W. Bush rescued his Presidency by some controversial decisions on the surge and the bailout in the last couple of years. Then he writes:

In reality, many of the Bush-era ventures that look worst in hindsight wereeither popular with the public at the time or blessed by the elite consensus.Voters liked the budget-busting tax cuts and entitlement expansions. The Iraqwar’s cheering section included prominent Democrats and scores of liberalpundits. And save for a few prescient souls, everybody — right and left, on WallStreet and Main Street — was happy to board the real-estate express and ride itoff an economic cliff.

I hate to say 'I told you so', but I did tell you so. I was one of those 'prescient souls' who opposed both the Iraq War from before it began (publicly) and who predicted around the same time that the economic path we were on, including the housing bubble, would lead to disaster. (I convinced my son to avoid buying a house before the crash, for that very reason.)

Douthat is right, I was pretty much alone in that in my circle. Few joined me, and more than a few thought I was going off the deep end, when in fact they were the ones going off the deep end and I was trying desperately to get them to see their folly.

This leads to several conclusions. The 'conventional wisdom' is often tragically wrong and horribly misguided. Conforming to such 'conventional wisdom' is perhaps the most foolish thing anyone can do. However, for whatever reason, most people are conformists and therefore blind to what is actually going on. Only a few people have been given the gift of nonconformity (and it is a gift, not an achievement). These 'prophets' should be respected and listened to, not scoffed at and ignored.

And then there is the Israel lobby. The good news is that there is a newpro-Israel organization, J Street, which is committed to the two-state solutionand firmly behind Obama. The bad news is that the American Israel Public AffairsCommittee (AIPAC) and other defenders of the status quo remain powerful, andthey will surely oppose any attempt to pressure Netanyahu. In May, for example,AIPAC drafted a letter warning Obama to "work closely and privately" withIsrael. It garnered 329 signatures in the House and 76 names in the Senate.During the August recess, 56 members of Congress visited Israel, and HouseMajority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters that it was a mistake tomake settlement construction the key issue and that there was a "significantdifference" between settlements in the West Bank and those in East Jerusalem.

If Obama tries to make aid to Israel conditional on a settlement freeze,Congress will simply override him. Putting real pressure on Israel risksalienating key politicians and major Democratic fundraisers, as well as Israel'ssupporters in the media, imperiling the rest of Obama's agenda and conceivablyhis prospects for reelection. Moreover, several of Obama's top advisers, such asDennis Ross, are enthusiastic supporters of America's "special relationship"with Israel and would almost certainly oppose using U.S. leverage to forceIsraeli concessions. Obama and special envoy George Mitchell are negotiatingwith one hand tied behind their backs, and Netanyahu knows it.

In sum, we would be physically healthier, economically healthier andstrategically healthier [by raising the gas tax]. And yet, amazingly, eventalking about such a tax is “off the table” in Washington. You can’t mention it.But sending your neighbor’s son or daughter to risk their lives in Afghanistan?No problem. Talk away. Pound your chest.

What made the lone, piercing cry of “You lie!” shocking was that itbreached a previously secure barrier. It was the first time that the violentrage surging in town-hall meetings all summer blasted into the same room as thepresident. Wilson’s televised shout was tantamount to yelling “Fire!” in acrowded theater. When he later explained that his behavior was “spontaneous”rather than premeditated, that was even more disturbing. It’s not good for thecountry that a lawmaker can’t control his anger at Barack Obama. It givespermission to crazy people.

The White House was right not to second Carter’s motion and cue another“national conversation about race.” No matter how many teachable moments wehave, some people won’t be taught. (Though how satisfying it would have been forObama to dismiss Wilson, like the boorish Kanye West, as a “jackass.”) But thereis a national conversation we must have right now — the one about what, inaddition to race, is driving this anger and what can be done about it. We arekidding ourselves if we think it’s only about bigotry, or health care, or evenObama. The growing minority that feels disenfranchised by Washington can’t be soeasily ghettoized and dismissed.

As I written before, it's about guns, abortion, fundamentalism, immigration, economic crisis, and the crazed ideological promptings of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, that is coming together in a perfect storm of paranoia. How dangerous is it? Well, probably not too dangerous, unless someone starts a series of suicide bombings or takes out Obama or Pelosi.

Otherwise, the rage will eventually be assuaged by declining popularity of the Democrats and electoral victories on the Right.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

I have no patience with those who want to pretend that racism is not anout-and-out big deal in the United States, as it always has been. We may havemade progress, and we may have a black president, but the scourge is still withus. And if you needed Jimmy Carter to remind you of that, then you’ve beenwandering around with your eyes closed.

I just think this is way overstated. Racism is still around (and will always be around), but it's a whole lot better than it used to be. And the younger you are, the less racism is an issue, which bodes well for the future.

The Right's problem with Obama is not his race, no more than their real problem with Clinton was his promiscuity. They will use whatever they can find to undermine their political enemies. When it comes to their own promiscuous or black politicians, no problem. That shows that the real issues lie elsewhere.

What are those issues? Guns, abortion, immigrants, corporate profits, support for military actions abroad, cheap oil, fundamentalist delusions, protection of current economic advantages and wealth. Those are the things driving the Right to their current crazy antics.

Derek Shearer, former economist in the Clinton administration, Ambassador to Finland, and professor of Diplomacy at Occidental College, sees what lots of others are seeing about Obama's administration:

In speeches earlier this year, most notably at Georgetown University,President Obama said that he wants to lay the foundation for new economicgrowth--growth that improves citizens' lives and does less damage to theenvironment. Unfortunately, while his words are bold, he acts cautiously when itcomes to actual reforms that are necessary to create this new foundation foreconomic growth, and he runs the risk of returning to the same old "moneyvalues" that underpin Reaganomics, which brought us the recent economiccrisis.His proposals, and his economic team, seem at variance with his rhetoric.Whether this is a function of his true beliefs about what his goals really are,or simply his political calculus of what is possible, is difficult to know. Onthe evidence, we do know that his choice of economic advisers and appointees hasnot been reformist. Instead of Joe Stiglitz, James Galbraith, Paul Krugman orBarry Bluestone, he has selected Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and ChristinaRoemer. Even Laura Tyson and Robert Reich, both of whom endorsed and campaigned for Obama, would have been more progressive and reform-minded.

In Washington, personnel is, in large part, policy--and who you see inpower is what you get. Obama picked stabilizers not reformers. His recent speechto Wall Street spoke more about responsibility than about reform, as if it werepersonal failings rather than an unbalanced system that caused the crisis.Obama's proposed reforms are moderate and in the analysis of many experts likeSimon Johnson of MIT, insufficient to prevent a future meltdown. Wall Streetseems to have returned to its old ways of doing business, only with even largerfinancial conglomerates like the new Bank of America which swallowed Countrywide and Merrill Lynch and is surely "too big to fail." The message seems to be thatthe Obama government will bail out the big companies to get back to stabilityand growth, but not significantly change the way the system operates to preventfuture bailouts.

Here is an interesting essay on why we are trying to fight in Afghanistan, by a veteran American reporter, William Pfaff, based in France. Here's a taste:

A retired CIA counterterrorism chief named Haviland Smith has suggested ina newspaper article that Obama trapped himself during the campaign into havinghis own war (like most other recent presidents). He made the promise to leaveIraq, and to defend against Republican accusations of weakness he announced thatinstead he would fight the real war in Afghanistan, theoretically against binLaden. Now Obama is caught, and has handed the war over to his militaryadvisers, who assure him that they know how to win wars, even though they are ata loss to explain what would constitute victory in this one.

Ellen Goodman, who is a good liberal writer but seems absent from the internet these days, writes:

For me, the real Obama moment of this back-to-work season wasn’t the speechbefore Congress or Wall Street. It was in the Virginia schoolhouse when aninth-grader asked him a question that had nothing and everything to do with hispresidency: “And if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who wouldit be?”

The president was not about to choose Lindsay Lohan. Nor did he pickAbe Lincoln. His answer was Gandhi. Yes, that Gandhi.

“It would probably be a really small meal because he didn’t eat a lot,”he added with humor. But the icon of nonviolent leadership was his inspirationbecause “he ended up doing so much and changing the world just by the power ofhis ethics.”

As I heard this, I imagined a huge groan emanating skyward from afrustrated phalanx of his supporters. “Gandhi? Did he say Gandhi?”

This is the Obama story. Right from the get-go, Americans were attracted toa man who was more collaborative than combative. Hillary was the tough guy inthe primaries. McCain was the warrior in the election. Obama was the Oprahcandidate who believed we could talk with anyone, even our enemies.

At times, supporters urged him into trench warfare with Sen.Clinton. He didn’t go, and he won. At times, advisers wanted him to duke it outwith Sen. McCain. He didn’t, and he won.

The country liked a man who fashioned himself as a healer. And yetthere has always been this underlying anxiety. Can you be a healer and apolitician? If you try to mediate an ideological divide, do you just end up inthe crossfire?

Clearly, Obama knows this. But it’s equally clear that he wants to do thisleadership thing his own way. As his would-be dinner companion would say, “Bethe change you wish to see in the world.”

A president has only so much capital to expend, both in tax dollars andpublic tolerance, and Barack Obama is dangerously overdrawn. He has tried tohave it all on three fronts, and his administration is in serious danger ofgoing bankrupt. He has blundered into a deepening quagmire in Afghanistan, hascontinued the Bush policy of buying off Wall Street hustlers instead ofconfronting them and is now on the cusp of bargaining away the so-called publicoption, the reform component of his health care program.

Those are not happy sentences to write for one who is still on the e-maillist of campaign supporters urged to back the president in the face of attacksthat are stupidly small-minded. But to remain silent about his errors, justbecause most of his critics are so vile, is hardly an example of constructiveconcern for him or the country.

Yes, Obama was presented with a series of crises not of hismaking but for which he is now being held accountable. He is not a "socialist"who grew the federal budget to astronomical proportions. That is the legacy ofGeorge W. Bush, who raised the military budget to its highest level since WorldWar II despite the end of the Cold War and the lack of a formidable militaryopponent-- a legacy of debt compounded by Bush's decision to first ignore thebanking meltdown and then to engage in a welfare-for-Wall-Street bailout. And itwas Bush who gave the pharmaceutical companies the gift of a very expensivegovernment subsidy for seniors' drugs.

But what is nerve-racking about Obamais that even though he campaigned against Bush's follies he has now embracedthem.

Friday, September 18, 2009

I was just listening to another BP ad about energy production (alternative and otherwise), and it occurred to me what's missing: conservation. There is very little being said about conservation, which is where the 'low hanging fruit' is to be had. Every megawatt of electricity or barrel of oil saved through conservation is a windmill or solarpanel that doesn't need to be built or offshore oil well that doesn't need to be drilled.

And the nice thing is: conservation is something that we as individuals can do a lot about. We can buy much more fuel efficient cars, insulate our homes, buy energy efficient appliances, and on and on.

Why isn't this being encouraged and pushed much, much more at every level of government and society?

Mike Ferner believes that we just need to get back to HR 676, the AmericaPlan. It makes sense.

President Obama was Candidate Obama the last time he mentioned theAmericaPlan and Sen. Baucus had 13 doctors and nurses arrested in his hearingroom for trying to get it discussed even briefly, so you may not have heard muchabout the AmericaPlan.

Suffice it to say there is indeed a single payer – the federal government –which replaces the health insurance companies and their morbidly obese salaries,bloated bonuses, private jets to private Caribbean islands and a totallyunacceptable 30+% overhead.

That is the key. Medicare – that socialistic program teabaggers can’t waitto take advantage of when they hit 65 – has an overhead one-tenth of the privateinsurance companies! That savings nearly pays for an entire program which bringseverybody in; leaves nobody out. But to get there, our political leaders have totake on the very same insurance companies that make those big, fat, irresistiblecampaign contributions.

That’s where you and I come in.

Thanks once again to Sen. Baucus’ brilliant bill which, without the publicoption fig leaf, is more likely to die a well-deserved death, we have one morechance to pass the AmericaPlan, HR 676. To do it, we only have to do twothings:

Mark Weisbrot, an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, writes:

Corruption takes many forms in different countries and locations. Here inthe United States it may not be as common to pay off a judge or a customsofficial as it is in most low and middle income countries, but we do have quitea bit of legalized bribery, especially in the form of electoral campaigncontributions. The most obvious current case is that of health care reform,where the powerful insurance, pharmaceutical and other lobbies are in theprocess of vetoing some of the most important parts of the health care reformthat most Americans want and need. For example, the vast majority of Americansfavor a public option – insurance offered by the government, as we have forsenior citizens in the Medicare program – yet these powerful interests areblocking it in the Senate. This is despite the modest nature of the reform,which would not provide free or universal insurance, but rather an additionaloption that employers and individuals could buy into, with some subsidies forthose who could not afford it. The insurance companies don’t want competition,and the pharmaceutical corporations don’t want another potentially large buyerthat could bargain against their own monopoly power over the prices of patenteddrugs.

The United States is a rich country, so it seems obvious that our formsof corruption are preferable to those that plague developing countries. And theyare, in the sense that it that it is always better to be a rich country and haverich country problems than to be a poor or middle-income country. But if we lookat the United States from the point of view of its potential – and I don’t meanutopian dreams but merely what is quite feasible and practical in the immediateor near future – it seems that we have a very limited form of democracy.

David Michael Green, professor of political science at Hofstra University, writes (read the whole thing at the link--it's well worth it):

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which proposinga new and better version of corporate-plunder masquerading as nationalhealthcare gets you burned in effigy for being a socialist stooge by gun-totingangry mobs.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which thesame people who hate you for being a socialist simultaneously hate you for beinga fascist.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which angrymobs of supposed anti-socialist demonstrators scream at their congressionalrepresentatives to “keep your government hands off my Medicare”.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which claimsthat the government is going to start killing off seniors are taken seriously bytens of millions of people.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which peopleare all worked up about government czars, but sat silently while the Bushadministration destroyed the Bill of Rights and used a thousand signingstatements to write Congress out of the Constitution.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which deficitshave all of a sudden become the source of enormous anger among people who saidnothing about them previously, as the tax cuts for the wealthy, off-budget warsbased on lies, and unfunded prescription drug Big Pharma giveaway transmogrifiedthe biggest surplus in American history into the biggest deficit ever.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in whichpoliticians can rant incessantly about other peoples’ sexual morality, getcaught screwing prostitutes, and then still be reelected to the highest ranks ofgovernment by trashing the president.

I could go on and on, but what would be the point? The positions ofso many Americans on so many policy questions are truly inane – yes, forsure. I wish that was all that concerned me. But it all goes so muchdeeper than that.

The entire premise of a self-ruling democracy rests on some reasonabledegree of rationality and some reasonable degree of an ability to discriminatebetween real information and falsehoods. Today’s American democracy seemsto lack these qualities in increasingly abundant amounts.And yet it goes deeperthan that still. The entire premise of a society – any society, democracyor not – is that it possesses a certain degree of shared community, a ‘we-ness’that transcends narrower tribalisms and self-interest in critical ways and atcritical moments. That too has unraveled of late. Think of the nicewhite men with shotguns blocking the exit from flooded New Orleans during theworst moments of Hurricane Katrina.

Here's a little different perspective on the recent stock market uptrend, by Mike Whitney:

We keep hearing that "The worst is behind us", but the spin doesn't squarewith the facts. Sure the stock market has done well, but scratch the surface andyou'll find that things are not as what they seem. Zero hedge--which is quicklybecoming the "go-to" market-update spot on the Internet--recently posted aneye-popping chart which traces the Fed's monetization programs (QuantitativeEasing) with the 6-month surge in the S&P 500. The $917 billion increase insecurities held outright equals the Fed's $1 trillion increase to its balancesheet. In other words, the liquidity from the Fed is following the exact sametrajectory as stocks, a sure sign that the market is being manipulated.

Surprisingly, traders seem to know that the Fed is goosing the marketand have just shrugged it off as "business as usual". Go figure? Perhaps it paysto take a philosophical approach to market rigging. Who needs the gray hairanyway? The result, however, has been that short-sellers (traders betting themarket will go down) who have placed their bets according to (weak)fundamentals, have gotten clobbered. They appear to be the last holdouts whostill place their faith in the unimpaired operation of the free market. (Right)Here's how former hedge fund manager Andy Kessler sums it up in a recent WallStreet Journal article, "The Bernanke Market":

"By buying U.S. Treasuries and mortgages to increase the monetary baseby $1 trillion, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke didn't put money directly into thestock market but he didn't have to. With nowhere else to go, except maybecommodities, inflows into the stock market have been on a tear. Stock and bondfunds saw net inflows of close to $150 billion since January. The dollars hecranked out didn't go into the hard economy, but instead into tradable assets.In other words, Ben Bernanke has been the market."

There has been much ado about Joe Wilson's rebel cry against the President during a joint session of Congress. As a progressive or radical or something like that, I naturally take issue with Representative Wilson. Yet I have to agree with David Brooks (in his NYT column today) that 'it's not about race.'

At least not mostly. I think there might remain a hint of racism in the conservative southern Joe Wilson. I see it still around me here in this small southern town I live in. Jimmy Carter is correct about that. It's by no means completely gone.

Yet President Bush appointed Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice to be his two Secretaries of State. Either of them might have had a shot at winning the Republican nomination if they had run. That being the case, it seems hard to say that racism still dominates the Republican party.

Yet David Brooks' answer, that rural white 'populism' is rebelling against progressive 'elitism', doesn't seem right either. The only person I know who went to the 9/12 rally was hardly rural (though he was white). He was a retired urologist, who had graduated from Princeton and Wake Forest University. (Indeed, the only conservative Republican staffer I know, who works for Mitch McConnell, is a sophisticated, well-educated young lady from one of the wealthier families in town.)

No, this is not the Hamiltonians (progressives) versus the Jeffersonians (populists), as Brooks postulates. That dichotomy does not exist anymore.

The disciples of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Seann Hannity, and Fox News who attended 9/12 are a weird mixture of corporate interests, Wall Street bankers, Chamber of Commerce types, southern reactionaries, the military and their supporters, neo-conservatives, old thinking physicians, fearful elderly, libertarians, small-town 4th of July patriots, NRA members, Christian fundamentalists and so on.

Now the odd thing is they 'only' make up some 30% or less of our population. But their ferocity, stoked by nonstop watching of Fox News celebrities and listening to the ravings of Rush Limbaugh, makes up for their smaller numbers. Indeed, this make them a potent national force to be reckoned with, as Nancy Pelosi made clear yesterday, when she urged a lower of the national temperature and rhetoric, recalling the violence in San Francisco more than 30 years ago.

No, David, if Thomas Jefferson were alive today, I doubt he would have attended the 9/12 Beckian rally in Washington. That former Ambassador to France, a true francophile, would probably have stayed at Monticello, reading his books and tending his garden.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

I agree with Matthew Yglesias' take on Obama's cancellation of the proposed missile defense system in eastern Europe:

Today, the Obama administration announced officially that it will kill aBush administration initiative to build a missile defense system in Poland andthe Czech Republic in order to protect Europe from Iranian missiles. This is agood call. Bush’s idea was hugely expensive, and massively illogical. For onething, Poland and the Czech Republic aren’t in any sense between Iran andEurope. Nor is Iran actually threatening Europe with any missiles. Which is whynobody in Europe particularly wanted this thing built. The exception was thePoles and Czechs themselves who liked the idea as a token of America’scommitment to defend them against Russia. Which is how we wound up situation ananti-Iranian missile shield in a place that doesn’t make sense as ananti-Iranian measure, but does piss off Russia.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Since I don't watch Fox News, I'm really quite ignorant about the rise of one of its new stars, Glenn Beck. When I see him on clips, he reminds of nothing so much as a southern TV evangelist. He seems like a big joke. But it's becoming clear that he's not a joke at all. His 9/12 Ralley brought a lot of quite crazy people to Washington.

Monday, September 14, 2009

For my final post of the day, I want to excerpt Justin Raimondo's piece on Afghanistan. As you'll see, he is echoing a recent statement by Zbig Brzezinski (sp?) that America may be moving down the same path the Soviets trod in Afghanistan:

When you look at it, our war aims in Afghanistan are virtually identical tothe Soviets’ – and one would think we’d learn some lessons from their utterfailure (and subsequent rapid decline). Like the Kremlin, circa 1980, we arepledged to build a strong central Afghan government, one that has gained theallegiance –or, at least, the passive compliance – of the people. Our intent,like theirs, is to "reform," i.e., modernize Afghan society, at least to someextent, a goal that seems to elude us as much as it did the People’s DemocraticParty of Afghanistan and their Red Army allies. The Afghan people, it seems,want no part of modernity, either the Marxist version or its Euro-Americandoppelganger, and all attempts to impose it by force are doomed to failspectacularly.

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan conservative economist who has become a radical in his domestic and foreign policy views, writes about health care reform:

The current health care “debate” shows how far gone representativegovernment is in the United States. Members of Congress represent thepowerful interest groups that fill their campaign coffers, not the people whovote for them.

The health care bill is not about health care. It is aboutprotecting and increasing the profits of the insurance companies. The mainfeature of the health care bill is the “individual mandate,” which requireseveryone in America to buy health insurance. Senate Finance Committeechairman Max Baucus (D-Mont), a recipient of millions in contributions over hiscareer from the insurance industry, proposes to impose up to a $3,800 fine onAmericans who fail to purchase health insurance.

The determination of “our” elected representatives to serve theinsurance industry is so compelling that Congress is incapable of recognizingthe absurdity of these proposals.

The reason there is a health care crisis inthe US is that the cumulative loss of jobs and benefits has swollen theuninsured to approximately 50 million Americans. They cannot afford healthinsurance any more than employers can afford to provide it.

It is absurd to mandate that people purchase what they cannot affordand to fine them for failing to do so. A person who cannot pay a healthinsurance premium cannot pay the fine.

These proposals are like solving thehomeless problem by requiring the homeless to purchase a house.

Time Magazine, the most recent issue: "America now faces the direst employment landscape since the Depression."

On April 7th of this year, the Chronicler (that's me), responding to an article in the NYT on returning to full employment, wrote:

"This reporting in the NYT really is economic 'wishful-thinking.' How can we conceivably return to the kind of economy we had in the recent housing-bubble of the past 5 years, or the dot-com bubble before that? Are we finally going to attempt to move into some kind of non-bubble economy, or are we fated to just have one bubble after another, followed by collapse? But the reason we have to have economic bubbles is that a non-bubble US economy wouldn't support full-employment or the kind of affluence we have experienced over the last two decades, and we haven't yet accepted that reality as a nation."

"All of this wishful thinking is predicated on increasing debt levels which are simply not sustainable for very much longer. Not only that, but the looming oil shortage and the corresponding price increases (which we tasted last summer) are going to really throw us for a loop. When I read statements like that above, I realize how out-of-touch our economic conventional wisdom really is."

The right is projecting its shadow onto Obama. The same qualities that makehim a saint to the left make him the devil to the right - he is easy to projectonto.

That is why he is the out of control spender when they sat ontheir hands through all of Bush's malfeasance. That is why his talking toschoolchildren is dangerous when our government wiretapping its citizens wasn’t.That is why saving the financial system from years of Republican regulation istaking away our future. The more evil revealed about the right’s excesseson torture, or wars of choice, or nearly destroying the economy, the more evilObama will look in their eyes, as they cannot tolerate owning responsibility,because in their own minds they are only good.

That is why he is the Fascist/Communist/Socialist/Muslim… that is thelist of our shadow projections over the last 60 years. In their minds he is nowthe USSR ("my grandchildren will have to stand in line for toilet paper!") oreven the Anti-Christ. The Obama they see is a projection of their own psyche,not that actual man in the White House. Missing birth certificates, deathpanels, indoctrinating children, these are all the projections running in theirown heads, not things happening in the real world.

Publius (whoever that is), reflecting on the Washington rally, writes:

It's also frustrating to hear angry protests from people who would beoutraged if we actually took government services away from them. Theironic aspect of the Tea Party movement is that it takes place within awidely-shared (if invisible) consensus that government should pay for lots ofexpensive stuff -- schools, retirement, massive military projects, and healthinsurance for senior citizens and poor people.

These costs are the bulk of the budget, but any politician whoproposed serious cuts to them would be chased out of town with pitchforks . .. by the Tea Party people.

The Medicare demagoguing is a perfect example of how internallycontradictory these protests can be. Think about it -- the GOP isdemagoguing "government-run health care" at the same time it demagoguesimaginary cuts to Medicare benefits. I mean, roughly 30%of the country is in a single-payer system already, and those programs areextremely popular.

On top of all this, the Obama administration itself is extremelypro-market and pro-capital (some would say excessively so). And theexamples cited to justify Obama's preference for "big government" don't holdup.

The finance meltdown was forced upon them, but they resisted the moreobviously "Leftish" policy of nationalizing banks. Their health carereform is painstakingly crafted to protect private insurers -- and is premisedalmost entirely on market competition. Obama, recall, also ran on aplatform of not raising taxes on virtually anyone in the country. It'shard to see the boogeyman here.

Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert --specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot n' dry meansdust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid landscape,redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward until itsettles on the broad shoulders of Colorado's majestic mountains, giving thesnowpack there a pink hue.

Some call it watermelon snow. Friends who ski into the backcountry of theSan Juan and La Plata mountain ranges in western Colorado tell me that thepink-snow phenomenon has lately been giving way to redder hues, so thick andfrequent are the dust storms that roll in these days. A cross-section of atypical Colorado snowbank last winter revealed alternating dirt and snow layersthat looked like a weird wilderness version of our flag, red and white stripesalternating against the sky's blue field.

Here in the lowlands, we, too, are experiencing the drying of the West innew dusty ways. Our landscapes are often covered with what we jokingly refer toas "adobe rain" -- when rain falls through dust, spattering windows or laundryhung out to dry with brown stains. After a dust "event" this past spring, Iwandered through the lot of a car dealership in Grand Junction, Colorado, wherethe only color seemingly available was light tan. All those previously shiny,brightly painted cars had turned drab. I had to squint to read price stickersunder opaque windows.

All of this is more than a mere smudge on our postcard-pretty scenery:Colorado's red snow is a warning that the climatological dynamic in the aridWest is changing dramatically. Think of it as a harbinger -- and of more thansimply a continuing version of the epic drought we've been experiencing thesepast several years.

The West is as dry as the East is wet, a vast and arid landscape of highplains and deserts broken by abrupt mountain ranges and deep canyons. Unlikeeastern and midwestern America, where there are myriad rivers, streams, lakes,and giant underground lakes, or aquifers, to draw on, we depend on snowpack forabout 90% of our fresh water. The Colorado River, running from its headwaters inthe snow-loaded mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, is the principal watersource for those states, and downstream for Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, andsouthern California as well.

While being developed into a crucial water resource, the Colorado becamethe most dammed, piped, legislated, and litigated river in America. Itsdevelopment spawned a major federal bureaucracy, the Bureau of Reclamation, aswell as a hundred state agencies, water districts, and private contractors tokeep it plumbed and distributed. Taken altogether, this complex infrastructureof dams, pipelines, and reservoirs proved to be the most expensive and ambitiouspublic works project in the nation's history, but it enabled the Southweststates and southern California to boom and bloom.

The downside is that we are now dangerously close to the limits of what theColorado River can provide, even in the very best of weather scenarios, and theweather is being neither so friendly nor cooperative these days. If Portlandsoon becomes as warm as Los Angeles and Seattle as warm as Sacramento, as someforecasters now predict, expect Las Vegas and Phoenix to be more like DeathValley.

If the Colorado River shut down tomorrow, there might be two, at mostthree, years of stored water in its massive reservoirs to keep Los Angeles, SanDiego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and dozens of other cities that depend on it alive.That margin for survival gets thinner with each passing year and with each risein the average temperature. Imagine a day in the not so distant future when thewater finally runs out in one of those cities -- a kind of slow-motion Katrinain reverse, a city not flooded but parched, baked, blistered, and abandoned. Ifthe Colorado River system failed to deliver, the impact on the nation'sagriculture and economy would be comparable to an asteroid strike.

Obama will be mostly remembered, I predict, for his failure to reform the financial system when he had the chance. The window of opportunity has now closed for that, it seems to me, and so the die is cast for another financial/economic crisis, only probably worse, somewhere down the line. Obama failed primarily because of the advisors he chose: Summers and Geithner. From the beginning, it was very clear they weren't going to seriously pursue reform. Anyone with half a brain could see that.

As he attempted to do with health care reform last week, the President istrying to breathe new life into financial reform. He's using the anniversary ofthe death of Lehman Brothers and the near-death experience of the rest of theStreet, culminating with a $600 billion taxpayer financed bailout, to summon thepolitical will for change. Yet the prospects seem dubious. As with health carereform, he has stood on the sidelines for months and allowed vested interests toframe the debate. Nor has he come up with a sufficiently bold or coherent set ofreforms likely to change the way the Street does business, even ifenacted.

Let's be clear: The Street today is up to the same tricks it wasplaying before its near-death experience. Derivatives, derivatives ofderivatives, fancy-dance trading schemes, high-risk bets. "Our model reallynever changed, we've said very consistently that our business model remained thesame," says Goldman Sach's chief financial officer.

The only difference now is that the Street's biggest banks know forsure they'll be bailed out by the federal government if their bets turn sour --which means even bigger bets and bigger bucks.Meanwhile, the banks' giganticpile of non-performing loans is also growing bigger, as more and more joblessAmericans can't pay their mortgages, credit card bills, and car loans. So forgetany new lending to Main Street. Small businesses still can't get loans. Evencredit-worthy borrowers are having a hard time getting new mortgages.

The mega-bailout of Wall Street accomplished little. The only bigwinners have been top bank executives and traders, whose pay packages are onceagain in the stratosphere. Banks have been so eager to lure and keep top dealmakers and traders they've even revived the practice of offering ironclad,multimillion-dollar payments -- guaranteed no matter how the employee performs.Goldman Sachs is on course to hand out bonuses that could rival its recordpre-meltdown paydays. In the second quarter this year it posted its fattestquarterly profit in its 140-year history, and earmarked $11.4 billion tocompensate its happy campers. Which translates into about $770,000 per Goldmanemployee on average, just about what they earned at height of boom. Of course,top executives and traders will pocket much more.

So Obama is going to Wall Street to urge them to reform their ways? That's like going into a saloon to urge the drinkers there to please not drink too much! It's like going into a body-building club to urge them not to become too muscle-bound! It's like going to McDonald's and asking the patrons not to eat the fries! It's like going to a casino and asking them only to spend $20!! It's like....

Give me a break!! Does anyone take any of this seriously? It's total farce.

President Obama will head to Wall Street on Monday to try to breathe newlife into efforts to overhaul the financial regulatory system, an undertaking hehas said is essential to halting the abuses and failures that led to the currentcrisis.

While the health-care debate has raged nationwide throughout thesummer, financial reform virtually vanished from the public radar, even as anarmy of lobbyists worked on Capitol Hill to reshape the president's agenda.

In New York, Obama will try to retake the initiative, capping otherrecent efforts in which top government officials have emphasized improvements inthe economy and made the case anew for rewriting the nation's financialrulebook. He will urge members of the financial community "to takeresponsibility, not only to support reforming the regulatory system but also toavoid a return to the practices on Wall Street that led us to the financialcrisis," an administration official said Sunday.

My biggest gripe against Obama? Not picking this man, Joseph Stiglitz, as his main economic advisor, instead of that Coke-addicted (I mean soda) Clintonian, Larry Summers.

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. hasfailed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the creditcrunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail bankshave become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “Theproblems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

Stiglitz’s views echo those of former Federal Reserve Chairman PaulVolcker, who has advised President Barack Obama’s administration to curtail thesize of banks, and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, who suggested lastmonth that governments may want to discourage financial institutions fromgrowing “excessively.”

A year after the demise of Lehman forced the Treasury Department tospend billions to shore up the financial system, Bank of America Corp.’s assetshave grown and Citigroup Inc. remains intact. In the U.K., Lloyds Banking GroupPlc, 43 percent owned by the government, has taken over the activities of HBOSPlc, and in France BNP Paribas SA now owns the Belgian and Luxembourg bankingassets of insurer Fortis.

While Obama wants to name some banks as “systemically important”and subject them to stricter oversight, his plan wouldn’t force them to shrinkor simplify their structure.

Stiglitz said the U.S. government is wary of challenging the financialindustry because it is politically difficult, and that he hopes the Group of 20leaders will cajole the U.S. into tougher action.